


Little Bird

by Drag0nst0rm



Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Broken Bones, Fluff, Gen, Kid Fic, Light Angst, Textual Ghosts, The Chickens Must Die, Years of the Trees
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-25
Updated: 2020-08-25
Packaged: 2021-03-06 21:08:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,003
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26005453
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Drag0nst0rm/pseuds/Drag0nst0rm
Summary: “We have to kill the chickens,” Nerdanel told her father. “All of them, but especially the big one.”Her father did not seem convinced.
Relationships: Mahtan Aulender & Nerdanel, Mahtan Aulendur's Wife & Nerdanel, Mahtan Aulendur/Mahtan Aulendur's Wife
Comments: 30
Kudos: 102
Collections: Tolkien Reverse Summer Bang 2020





	Little Bird

**Author's Note:**

  * For [CateWolfe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/CateWolfe/gifts).



> I loved creating this piece for CateWolfe's beautiful artwork, which you can find [here](https://imgur.com/a/rSkNFwt).

Nerdanel was searching for interesting rocks by the creek when she heard her mother scream.

The sound was so strange that for a moment all she could do was stand frozen, her overskirt still bunched around her knees and full of rocks.

Then she dropped the white cloth and let her carefully chosen stones clatter down to her feet. They hit her legs with bruising force as she took off running, but that didn’t matter.

She had heard her mother scream only once before. That time, it had been because Nerdanel had fallen on the rocky banks of the creek, and blood had been sheeting down her face from where she had hit her head. She had run home wailing from the pain and the shock, and her mother had taken one look at all that blood and shrieked before running up to clean her off and make everything better.

But Nerdanel had not come running home covered in blood, not this time, which meant it must have been Atar who had made Ammë scream, and Nerdanel could barely stand the thought. Atar was enormous, untouchable, invincible, and the idea that she might be wong -

She burst from the trees that crowded near the creek and looked at once for her father, but his mountainous figure was nowhere to be found.

Instead, there was just her mother, lying on her side just outside the fence that surrounded the chicken coop. 

Nerdanel hadn’t known a leg could bend that way.

She was pretty sure it wasn’t supposed to.

The chickens were squawking and flurrying around, but Ammë was painfully still, and no screams had followed the first.

Nerdanel could, however, still hear a steady stream of hoarse whispers, so different from her mother’s usual voice.

“ . . . I’ll wring it’s neck and put it in a stew with potatoes and garlic, and won’t that be nice? No more flurrying around and getting underfoot, just a nice dish of chicken and potatoes, and, no, darling, I have not seen your prize bird, perhaps a fox got it . . .” 

Nerdanel flung herself down beside her mother. She wanted to throw her arms around her, but she was scared to touch her. Her mother was so pale, sweat streaking down her whitened face, and that leg . . . 

“Ammë?”

Her mother reached out and grabbed her hand at once. Her grip was too tight, but Nerdanel didn’t mind. She held back just as tightly. 

“I’m alright,” her mother said, and she tried to smile, but it didn’t quite work. “I just tripped over one of your Atar’s chickens, that’s all, and I landed wrong.”

That didn’t sound too bad. Nerdanel tripped all the time, and it was fine.

But her leg had never bent like her mother’s had.

“But I need you to go get help now, alright? I don’t think I can stand on my own, and your father won’t be back for hours.”

“I can help you,” Nerdanel said quickly. That sounded much better than leaving her mother alone, and her mother was only two hand spans taller than her. She could do it, she was sure she could. 

“Yes, you can, but not by helping me stand,” Ammë said firmly. “Help me by going to get – “

“Líriel? Líriel, are you there?” Moriyé’s voice echoed down the path, high with concern, and Nerdanel ached with relief. Moriyé was almost as tall as Atar; he was certainly big enough to help.

“Over here!” she called, jumping to her feet and waving so that he could see her better. “Hurry, hurry!”

Moriyé’s dark hair was still covered in flour, and Nerdanel could picture him throwing down the dough for the bread he helped his wife make and leaving the bakery at a run. With so many of their neighbors gone to sell their goods at the market day in Tormiron, he might have been the only one close enough to hear Ammë’s scream.

But that was alright because Moriyé was plenty big enough to help Ammë, even if his muscles weren’t quite as impressive as Atar’s, and because he would surely know what to do. 

His face went nearly as pale as Ammë’s when he saw how her leg was twisted, but he did know what to do, which was to say, “Stay here with your mother. I’ll go fetch the healer,” and then immediately run to do so.

Nerdanel sank back down to the ground and offered her hand again. She’d yanked it out of her mother’s without meaning to when she hopped to her feet, and she knew how important it was to have someone’s hand to hold when you were hurt. Atar had held hers the whole time Ammë was bandaging her forehead that time when she had accidentally made her mother scream, and Atar wasn’t here this time, so she would just have to do it in his stead.

Her mother took her hand and squeezed it again. “The chicken I tripped over is still loose,” she said. “I need you to make sure it didn’t get too far once the healer comes.”

“She’ll come back when it’s feeding time,” Nerdanel assured her mother because that was what Atar always said, so there was no reason for Ammë to worry about it.

“Still. Just to be sure. It is your father’s prize chicken.”

Nerdanel nodded because perhaps prize chickens were different from regular chickens and because it seemed wrong to argue with her mother when her Ammë’s voice was so strained.

“Good,” her mother said. “Good.” 

Nerdanel wasn’t sure what else to do while they waited for the healer, so she started singing the get-well song her mother always crooned over her cuts and bruises. Her own voice wasn’t nearly as high and pretty as her mother’s, and she stumbled over some of the trickier notes, but her mother’s eyes were locked on her, and Ammë was almost smiling again, so she kept singing it.

“Little bird, little bird, 

Don’t mind the broken wing. 

I’ll make you another one,

Just listen as I sing. 

Little bird, little bird,

I’ll make it out of gold.

And it will last you always,

Or at least ‘til you’re old.

Little bird, little bird – “ 

Her head snapped up when she heard footsteps running towards them. Moriyé was back, and he had brought Carnasië and her apprentice with him. The apprentice blanched when he took in the scene, but Carnasië just let out a huff of breath, cheeks flushed from the run, and sank down to get to work.

“Singing, were you? Good. Always best to have something to think about beside the pain.”

Ammë squeezed her hand one last time and then let go. “Thank you, little one. Will you go find that chicken for me now?”

Nerdanel still didn’t want to leave, but she had promised, so she nodded and forced herself back to her feet. The grass had rubbed green stains all over her white skirt, but no one could possibly be upset with her about that now, and that meant it wouldn’t matter if she got it dirtier chasing after the chicken. 

Ammë hadn’t said which way the chicken had gone, so Nerdanel ran towards the creek first, thinking it could more quickly get into trouble there and thus should be the first place she checked.

She ran fast. She could run faster than any child her age in the village, and she had won the races to prove it.

She still didn’t run fast enough to be out of range of her mother’s scream.

She did not find the chicken. It returned on its own in the evening when it was time to throw grain out for the birds to lure them back into their coop, just like Nerdanel had told her mother it would.

Nerdanel scowled at it when she saw it and deliberately threw the grain so that the other chickens would have first shot at it. 

Prize chicken or not, it didn’t deserve grain.

Her mother was asleep inside. The healer had splinted her leg and made her promise to rest it for as long as she could. She had sung over it too, to make it heal quicker, but even Carnasië couldn’t heal a broken bone in a day. Her apprentice had said he’d heard they could in Tirion, or Lorien, maybe, and Carnasië had said rather tartly that yes, and maybe back in Beleriand elves had learned how to fly. 

Maybe they had. But it wouldn’t help them here.

Ammë had said that was true, but it would still be rather nice to fly. Then she had gone straight to sleep.

Nerdanel wondered if she was dreaming of flying. Ammë was right, it might be nice.

Then again, chickens could fly, at least a little, and chickens were horrible, as plainly evidenced by the events of today.

The Mingling was almost over now, the light far more silver than gold, and she knew she should go inside, but it made her shiver to think of going in there, alone but for her mother, who was still wrapped in a song-woven sleep.

It was better out here where she could hear the quiet sounds of the village settling in to sleep and where she had a far better view of the road Atar would be returning on. 

The road twisted too sharply for her to see too far down it, and the buildings of the village got in the way too, but she could approaching travelers just fine. She had jumped at the sounds of several carts already, but they had always turned out to be someone else returning home from the market.

She didn’t want someone else. She wanted Atar.

She bit her lip to prepare herself for disappointment before looking up when she once again caught the sound of a lone horse pulling a cart down the dusty road.

Except this time she wasn’t disappointed.

This time it was Atar, humming to himself as he walked beside the horse, face splitting into a smile when he saw her.

“Nerdanel! How’s my favorite girl?”

Nerdanel ran so fast that she was pretty sure she was almost flying and crashed straight into her father’s arms. She let herself shudder in their safe, warm comfort for one, two, three breaths before pounding her fist on a chest that dwarfed it and leaning back.

“You have to kill the chickens,” she said firmly. “All of them, but especially the big one.”

“But then where would we get eggs?” her father asked in a far-too-reasonable voice.

“Moriyé,” she said promptly since the bakery kept its own coop of chickens. “Or anywhere. We can get eggs from plenty of places, but we can’t get Ammë an unbroken leg.”

Her father’s hands suddenly tightened on her shoulders. “A what?”

It took Atar two days to make a better brace for Ammë’s leg. He worked tirelessly in the forge until it was done. 

It was copper, of course. “The world’s most beautiful metal for the world’s most beautiful bride,” he said as he gently helped Ammë secure it. He said it with a smile, but it was a slightly anxious smile, and even Nerdanel could see her mother’s face was still tight with pain.

There was still a thick layer of bandages inside the brace so that the edges wouldn’t bite into her mother’s leg, and the lines of the metal were beautiful and elegant against the white cloth. The brace would make it easier for her mother to stand and walk although she was still to do both as little as possible and only while using the crutches Partano, the healer’s apprentice, had brought.

The crutches interested Nerdanel. They were made of smoothly sanded down wood, strictly practical, except for at the bottom where Partano had carved his name twice, once in Rumil’s old letters and once in the prince’s new Tengwar.

She had learned both from her mother, tracing the letters as they were written in her mother’s impossibly elegant script and lingering on the first letter of each page, which her mother always turned into a tiny work of art. Her mother wrote with the best hand in the village – in any village, probably, Nerdanel thought – and whenever anything really important had to be written, everyone came to her. People from Tormiron came sometimes, even. Mostly it was notices for births and marriages, but every dozen years the village sent in an accounting of the population to Tirion along with their taxes, and she had watched last year as her mother’s hand had traced out words that would be read by the king himself.

Obviously, Partano’s letters were nowhere near as good as her mother’s, but they fascinated her anyway. She liked the way she could feel them under her hand. It lent them a depth that letters on a page that she could skate her hand over and never notice could never quite have.

But she didn’t have much time to spend wasting on the letters. Since Ammë couldn’t move as much and Atar was busy in the forge, it was up to her to go to the well for more water, to go to Moriyé and his wife for more bread, and to inform the local rumor mill that her mother was getting better all the time.

On the nights when her father worked too late in the forge, it was also her job to feed the chickens.

“You’re going to make very good soup,” she informed the biggest one. “Atar will agree to it any day now. You’ll see.”

The chicken remained unmoved by her threats.

Her mother had started painting a row of little chickens under the window in the kitchen.

They were very beautiful.

Nerdanel hated them anyway.

Her mother saw the scowl on her face and laughed. “I had to paint something, or I was going to go mad stuck in here,” she said. “And unfortunately, chickens are the birds I have the best models for at the moment. I can hardly troop into the woods to find better ones.”

This was true, Nerdanel had to admit.

She scowled at them anyway.

Her mother leaned forward in her chair and confessed in a whisper, “Besides. I’ve had my revenge.”

Nerdanel perked up. “You have?”

“I have,” her mother confirmed. “With this painting, I have immortalized every single one of our chickens. All,” she said, holding up a finger, “except for one, who shall be forced to die in obscurity and be promptly forgotten despite the fleeting fame she had in life.” 

A closer inspection of the wall proved that the prized chicken was indeed missing from the row.

Nerdanel still thought a better revenge would be eating the chicken, but her mother’s smile was dancing with laughter instead of with an edge of pain for the first time since the accident, so Nerdanel decided it would do well enough for now.

The bird issue, however, remained a problem. If her mother wanted to see birds that weren’t chickens, then Nerdanel would just have to bring them to her.

Unfortunately, her efforts to catch real birds were largely unsuccessful. She was the fastest runner her age in the village, but that wasn’t quite fast enough to catch anything that could fly away from her.

For a moment, leaning against a tree and panting from her latest effort, Nerdanel was tempted to just give up on the idea.

But her stomach twisted at the thought, and she couldn’t bear to do it. 

She been relieved when Moriyé had shown up since it meant that she wouldn’t have to leave her mother, but she almost regretted it now. She had been all but useless, providing nothing more than a distraction before the real help arrived, sent away as soon as it came. If she had run and gotten Carnasië, she at least would have done something of use.

She had been a little more help since then but picking up extra chores was nothing compared to the pain her mother faced, and it was Atar her mother leaned on it when it spiked, not Nerdanel.

She had to do something. Anything. Just as long as it washed that memory of her mother’s strained face and Nerdanel’s helplessness away.

She couldn’t heal her mother’s leg, but she would bring her the birds she wanted, much better birds than chickens, if only she could figure out how.

That was when Nerdanel got her second idea.

She found Partano behind Carnasië’s house at the other end of the village. He was sitting under a tree and carving a small block of wood, though she couldn’t see what he was carving it into yet.

Nerdanel marched up to him and plopped down the sack she had carried with her from her bedroom. It landed with a satisfying thump, and Partano glanced up at the noise.

“Carnasië’s inside,” he said, already moving to get to his feet. “What’s happened?”

“I don’t need her,” Nerdanel told him. “I need you. I need to learn how to carve a bird from wood.”

He blinked.

“If you teach me,” Nerdanel added, “you can have some of my interesting rocks.” She crouched down and untied the string that kept the sack closed. She chose some of the better ones and put them on top of the sack for display. “I have a lot of them.”

Her favorite was the rock that had split open to reveal dazzling blue crystals within, but there was also a rock that looked startlingly like a nose, a rock that had been worn into a nearly perfect sphere by the water of the creek, a rock that glittered like gold but wasn’t, and a rock that was a deep blood red.

She had plenty of other good ones, but their points of interest needed explaining while these were appealing from the very first glance. 

Partano blinked again before clearing his throat. “I’m . . . not sure I can help you. I don’t really carve animals, just . . . practical things.” He gestured helplessly at his current project which a closer examination proved to be well on its way to becoming a spoon.

“But you can carve wood,” Nerdanel pointed out. “I can’t even do that. If you teach me that much, I can figure out the rest.”

“Are you even allowed to use knives yet?” he asked. “You’re awfully small.”

“Of course I’m allowed to use knives,” she said, “as long as I’m supervised. You’re supervision.”

Partano looked as if this was a new concept for him. Nerdanel wasn’t sure why. If he was old enough to be an apprentice, he must be practically ancient.

“Alright,” he finally agreed. “I’ll teach you. As long as you promise that if you get hurt using the knife, you’ll leave me out of it when we go to tell Carnasië.”

“Deal,” Nerdanel said, and she put the blood red stone on his leg to seal it.

She had thought the hardest part about learning to carve would be sneaking away from the house to do it, but with her mother housebound and her father working for most of Laurelin’s light in the forge, that was surprisingly easy. There were always more chores to do outside, and no one was in a position to make sure that she wasn’t taking too long at them.

No, getting away was the easy part.

The hard part was getting the knife to do what she actually wanted it to do.

It was too big in her small hands, but she could learn to work around that, she was sure of it.

It would just take time. And patience. And putting a few more stones into a bemused Partano’s hand.

The trick, she learned quickly, was marking the wood before she started making her cuts so that she could be sure she had everything spaced correctly. Carving wasn’t like drawing in the dirt with a stick; she couldn’t just go back and scuff out mistakes with her foot. She had to get it right on her first try or start over practically from the beginning.

This trick would be more useful if she knew what the correct spacing was. Partano could help her estimate, but he couldn’t say for sure, which meant that far more guess work went into the process than she would like.

She set her mouth and set to work on it again anyway, putting all her strength into pushing the blade through the wood that Partano assured her was “soft.”

The results were . . . interesting.

“It’s a . . . turtle?” Partano guessed.

Apparently, he had forgotten her goal. Or worse, even knowing it hadn’t been enough for the carved figure to suggest the correct shape to him.

Nerdanel threw it into the woods.

Partano made it look easy. The knife always cut exactly as deep as he wanted it to, and it never went skittering off in unexpected directions.

He tried to claim that this was because his work wasn’t as detailed as hers was, but Nerdanel knew better. She still remembered those perfect letters that had been carved into the base of her mother’s crutches. If he could carve those, he could handle detail work just fine, and he could teach her to do the same.

No matter how long it took to get things right.

“It’s pretty,” he said much more confidently.

She looked at him suspiciously. “But what _is_ it?”

He still didn’t have a good answer.

They didn’t talk much as they worked. Partano would speak up sometimes to tell her what she was doing wrong or to praise her for doing something right, but for the most part they worked in silence.

She liked the quiet, and the peace that slowly stole over the yard until all worries fled, and it was just the smoothly shining block of wood that was waiting to reveal all its secrets.

They were stubborn secrets, admittedly, but that was alright.

She was determined to outlast them.

“It’s a bird!” he said triumphantly.

“It is,” she agreed. “And it looks like a chicken.”

It joined its brethren of failures in the woods.

By this point, it was quite the large flock.

“It’s a bi-“ he began to declare without even looking, which was an insult so great Nerdanel almost forgot her more immediate problem.

When he did look up, he immediately went pale.

“That’s blood,” he said and immediately took off running for the house.

By the time Nerdanel caught up with him, his arms were already overflowing with bandages from the healer’s chest. Nerdanel was just glad that Carnasië seemed to be gone.

“It’s a cut,” she pointed out, looking from the small bead of blood on the edge of her finger to the abundance of white cloth in his arms. “A small cut,” she added helpfully.

“Right,” he said, sagging against the wall as his panic faded.

“Are you going to pass out?” she asked curiously. “I don’t think you should be a healer if this is enough blood makes you pass out.”

He muttered something about how she could explain it to her mountain of a father if she got a finger cut off before he turned around and started shoving the bandages back into place.

Nerdanel didn’t think that was fair. Ammë hadn’t had to explain her broken leg, so Nerdanel shouldn’t have to explain any missing fingers.

And besides it was such a little cut.

She stuck it in her mouth to suck away the blood.

Grown-ups were strange.

“It’s a bird,” she finally said after weeks of effort. “A good bird.”

“That does not look like a chicken,” Partano agreed.

It wasn’t quite perfect. Not yet. But it was the best thing she had done so far, and with just a little more work, she thought it would be presentable.

She offered Partano her treasured geode. It was the only rock she hadn’t found for herself. Her father had brought it back from Tormiron as a special treat years ago, and it had been the best piece of her collection ever since. The crystals glittered more enticingly than ever, but she had promised herself that she would give it up if Partano could teach her, and Partano had. Learning how to make a gift for her mother was far more important than a rock, no matter how interesting, and the joy of her success far outweighed the loss of the rock.

She still gave it one last look as she held it out.

Partano closed her hand back around it. “You keep that one,” he said. “I’ll take the one that looks like an arrowhead.”

“There are about a hundred of those down by the creek,” she felt honor bound to inform him.

“But none quite like this one,” he pointed out, which was, of course, true.

She eyed him carefully to make sure he wasn’t just humoring her, but his smile was innocent, so she let it go and carefully returned the crystals to their place of honor in her bag.

Atar would have understood her giving his gift away, she thought, just this once since it was a special circumstance, but she was still glad she didn’t have to.

She tried to hand him back his knife next, but he closed her hand around that too. 

“Keep it,” he said. “So you can keep practicing.”

She remembered to set the knife down before throwing her arms around him. Partano stiffened a little before slowly raising his arms and patting her back.

“Thank you,” he said unexpectedly. “I think I’ve learned more teaching than you than I’ve learned just by myself in a while. And I remembered how much I loved this, doing it with you.”

“Thank you for teaching me how to bring a bird to my mother,” she said which was the important part and what she really wanted to say. “And thank you for teaching me your craft.” That was the formal thing she was supposed to say, she was pretty sure. She had heard apprentices say it to her father before right before they left to go their own way. She wasn’t really an apprentice, of course – she wasn’t old – but it still seemed like the thing to do.

She had loved carving far more than she thought she would, and she hadn’t the slightest complaint with the results.

The bird wasn’t quite ready for her mother yet.

But it was excitingly, excruciatingly close. She could feel it.

And somehow, it felt right to put those last few touches on while she was alone.

She finished the bird in the shadow of the chicken coop. It blocked the view from the house, which would keep it a surprise from her mother, and it allowed her to work in the shade.

It also meant that when she sprang up in triumph, the little bird finally complete, that the chickens were the first ones to witness it.

They did not seem particularly interested.

She decided to forgive them.

But only for that particular offense.

She made sure the knife was carefully tucked away before she carried the little bird into the kitchen. She wasn’t hiding it, exactly, but it still felt like it might be better not to wave its existence too boldly in her mother’s face.

She found her mother tracing a sky-blue bird onto the inside corner of a cabinet where it could only be seen when all the dishes were waiting to be washed – or when they were where her mother had stashed them at present, which was a slightly precarious pile on the kitchen table. 

“I brought you a bird,” Nerdanel announced, and she held out her offering.

She was nervous suddenly, all her work’s tiny flaws jumping out at her. She should have tried harder to catch a real bird. She should have -

Her mother turned, a look of concern on her face that quickly turned to delight when she saw what was in Nerdanel’s hands. “It’s beautiful!” she cried. “Did you make it?”

All her nervousness fled. Nerdanel nodded and hoped her mother wouldn’t think to ask about how.

She hadn’t lied when she told Partano she was allowed knives so long as she was supervised. She was, however, a little less certain that Partano truly counted as supervision, and he hadn’t watched her put the finishing touches on the bird anyway. 

Better that questions not be asked.

“It’s wonderful,” her mother declared. “Will you put it on the windowsill for me? I want to see it every time I work in here.”

Nerdanel placed it carefully on the indicated place. It looked lovely against the blue of the sky, but it did not quite look real. It would be wonderful to be able to carve something so well that it could be mistaken for the actual thing about to take flight.

Or in flight, even, although she wasn’t quite sure how she would make that work.

She wasn’t sure wood would do for that, though, not quite the way she wanted. Stone might be better, and rocks were already so interesting anyway; surely a little carving would only make them more so.

Only she wasn’t sure her knife would do the trick, and she wasn’t sure what would. There were special tools, probably, but she didn’t know what they were, and she wasn’t sure who she could ask.

She would figure it out, she decided. She needed to replenish her cache of interesting rocks in any case. She could make sure to find some that looked suited for experiments.

But first, she could wait just a little longer and soak up her mother’s praise for her very favorite little bird.

(They did, eventually, eat Atar’s prize chicken. It went into a very good stew, with plenty of potatoes and just a touch of garlic.)

(By that point, years had passed. That did not in the least stop Nerdanel from savoring every last bite.)


End file.
